“Admiring the olden time” in the era of the “great turning point”: N.I. Vorobyev and teaching ethnography at Kazan institutes of higher education (1920s – early 1930s)

The paper examines the teaching activities of the famous ethnographer, geographer, researcher of the ethnography of the Tatars and other peoples of the Volga region, Nikolay Iosifovich Vorobyev, at Kazan University and the Eastern Pedagogical Institute in the 1920s – early 1930s. His role in organising special departments of these universities, where ethnography and related disciplines (anthropology, anthropogeography, ethnology, etc.) were taught, is shown. The views on ethnographic education of the Kazan teaching community, students and authorities at various levels are described. The paper shows that in the first years of the Soviet rule, ethnography was taught in large quantities at several Kazan institutes of higher education – Kazan University, North-Eastern Archaeological and Ethnographic Institute, and Eastern Pedagogical Institute. The main initiators of including ethnographic disciplines in the curriculum of institutes were employees of Kazan University, including N.I. Vorobyev. However, officials of the RSFSR People’s Commissariat for Education considered ethnography as a discipline that studies ‘backward peoples’ and ‘relicts’, and did not see it as a means of ideological education of students. Therefore, the number of hours assigned to this subject was reduced quite quickly. N.I. Vorobyev and his colleagues proposed a number of educational departments projects (geographical and museum-ethnographic sections of the Eastern Pedagogical Institute) in order to preserve ethnographic education in Kazan. As a result of their efforts, students of the Physics and Mathematics Department of Kazan University and the Eastern Department of the Eastern Pedagogical Institute studied ethnography and related subjects until its ‘defeat’ on the cusp of the 1920s and 1930s.